Marketing IT Cost Savings: Tame Your Frankenstack Now

If you’re the rare marketing professional, watching your IT budget grow, struggling to find ways to spend it all, congratulations. You can stop reading now. For the rest of us, Marketing IT cost savings are top of mind. Especially now as belts are tightened and priorities reevaluated. Getting the most value out of every IT marketing dollar spent could be the difference between surviving, and thriving.

According to Netskope, the average enterprise uses 120 SaaS applications in their marketing stack. That’s 120 point solutions, 120 annual contracts, 120 separate clouds, 120 logins, and countless integration (and failure) points. 

It’s a martech Frankenstack — a cobbled together mess of parts wreaking havoc across the countryside, followed by a hoard of villagers brandishing torches and pitchforks. Or, at least, the digital marketing equivalent of that scenario. You probably have some version of a Frankestack in your own organization. They’re cumbersome, inefficient, and expensive. They’re a potential disaster, teetering on the verge of chaos. As we all know, the out-of-control monster story never ends well.

An eMarketer study found that 64% of brand managers want to reduce the number of marketing vendors. And 57% say integration is the most challenging barrier to marketing technology success. Runaway marketing apps are a universal problem touching every part of the organization. Everyone feels the pressure to do more with less, to become more efficient. We all need to reduce our IT marketing spend.

Fortunately, there’s hope. A way to tame the Frankenstack, or at least keep it at bay. 

A unified front office customer experience management platform can help. By replacing dozens of point solutions with a single CXM platform, you can not only manage your direct costs, but create a better overall customer experience. From research, to digital marketing and advertising, to modern customer care and social engagement. A single platform, with a unified customer ID, can lead to epic customer experiences and lower IT spend. It’s a way to streamline marketing operations, cut costs, and make customers happier.

Imagine less licensing friction, lower overall licensing costs, and reduced administrative overhead. All with improved security and compliance. And, best yet, you don’t need to settle when it comes to best-of-breed functionality.

It’s like replacing your Frankenstack with the Six Million Dollar Man: better, stronger, faster. No longer a monster, but a well-functioning, efficient, customer experience machine. We have the technology.

Three years ago, when I was the US CMO at Microsoft, our marketing stack won a coveted chiefmartec.com Stackie Award. Looking back, I’m not sure whether to be proud or embarrassed (but I’m leaning toward embarrassment). Our “Stackie” submission included almost 50 point solutions, and I’m sure that wasn’t everything. Today, the current Microsoft martech environment is more unified and streamlined. More cost effective. The monster has been largely tamed.

Point solution consolidation tops the short list of ways to realize marketing IT cost savings. It’s time to tame your Frankenstack.